My biography of Angelica Balabanoff is out!

My biography of Angelica Balabanoff, The Strange Comrade Balabanoff: The Life of a Communist Rebel has been published at McFarland publishers after more than 4 years of intensive work. I’m the happiest personin the world.

About Angelica.

Born in 1878 to a wealthy Ukrainian family, Angelica Balabanoff broke ties with her parents and left for Europe to become one of the leading female socialists of the early 20th century. Just five feet tall, plump and plain, she was rumored to be a lover of Mussolini, Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin. Returning to Russia at the beginning of the October Revolution, she became one of the few women to occupy high-ranking positions within the all-male Bolshevik government, later fleeing Russia in disagreement with Lenin’s politics. She was accused by European and American secret services of promoting communist propaganda, and by the Soviets of disloyalty. She lived in small dormitory-like rooms, moving on
average every two years with her two suitcases of important documents. She died in Rome at the age 96, concluding her 65-year career by supporting Giuseppe Saragat in his quest to become president of Italy. During her nomadic life, state and police agencies in the countries she visited compiled documents on her. The author draws on this extensive, scattered archive in this first biography of Balabanoff.

3 Comments

Hello Maria,
my name is Danna Segal. I am an architect living in Israel. I do not know if this may interest you but I am a far
( or close?.. depending on how you look at it..) relative of Angelica Balabanoff. She was the cousin of my grandmother.
Of course I did not have a chance to meet her (I was born a year after she passed away, but my father got to meet her on 1951)
My E-Mail address is: dsl.arch@gmail.com
I still did not read your book, but I am planning to do so after I purchase it.
Congratulation on the publication of the book – it sounds very interesting.
Kindly,
Danna